Monday, July 31, 2006

And this, from Street of Shame in the same edition:

“Publication of a photograph of the dying Princess of Wales will trigger international revulsion,” screeched the Mirror following the news that an obscure Italian magazine had printed a picture of Diana being attended to by a paramedic. “No public good is served by the image, no new clue supplied to help us understand what happened that terrible night… only a voyeur without shame could enjoy looking at the grainy photograph.” The whole of page nine of the same day’s edition was filled with a full-length black-and-white photograph of the corpse of a young child killed by an Israeli air strike in Lebanon.

The Sun, meanwhile, was so disgusted at the “Diana Death Outrage” that it printed the picture on its front page – with most of the princess’s head blocked out, though the accompanying article helpfully described how the “her head is to one side as a paramedic tries to fit an oxygen mask to her face. She is slumped in the back of the silver Mercedes in which she died.” “It came as a devastating blow to Princes William and Harry”, the paper noted – not unlike the news that “a caddish TV cameraman” claimed to have had sex with Princess Diana for two-and-a-half minutes 20 years ago, which was splashed across the front page of the Sun two days previously, under the boastful strapline “Exclusive: Betrayal Will Cause More Hurt to Princes”.

Just in case William and Harry did not find the double-page spread sufficiently upsetting, the paper devoted several hundred words and five mugshots to the “string of other men” their mother is alleged to have had affairs with while she was married to their father.

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About Me

I'm one of the team of hacks at Private Eye magazine, where I've worked on and off since 1997. I'm also an editorial lieutenant on Popbitch (not sure what it means: we made up the job titles in the pub). I've written for a number of other newspapers and magazines, been a co-presenter on LBC, a regular newspaper reviewer on Sky News and written a biography of the Victorian businessman and philanthropist William Lever. My first novel, Topped of the Pops, a comedy thriller, was to be published in May 2008, until the publishers went bust. From 1999-2002 I was deputy editor of The Big Issue.